Friday, February 6, 2015

Note: We are reprinting an article by Savas Michael-Matsas summarizing the current state of the class struggle in Greece. Michael-Matsas is the Secretary of the EEK, the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece. The views are those of the author and not necessarily those of the permanent-revolution web site. We do think this statement gives one a good idea of the current situation in Greece and of the possibilities that have emerged for the intervention of revolutionary socialists. We have previously published the election statement of the EEK along with our comments.

The Greek people have shaken the world

by Savas Michael-Matsas

The Greek election of January 2015 was not a “normal”parliamentary contest. It marks a major turning point in the post 2007 world capitalist crisis, and the international class struggle. The European Union and the Eurozone re-emerges as the epicenter of the crisis. The illusions of an apparent “stabilization”in the financial markets after Draghis' famous statement in 2012 that the ECB will do “whatever it takes”to avoid the collapse of the Eurozone, are now dissipating. The Eurozone economy, both in the periphery and now in its “hard core”, is entangled in a vicious circle of recession, deflation and over-indebtedness, while all the draconian austerity measures and policies so far implemented, have totally failed to halt the downward spiral.

The launching of a much delayed “Quantitative Easing”program by the ECB on January 22, on the eve of the Greek elections, is a manifestation of this failure. The political expression of that failure is the electoral victory of Syriza in Greece, a few days later, which, as Philip Stephens rightly writes in the Financial Times( 29/1/2015) “crystallizes the impasse that has crippled the eurozone”. [1]

On the very day of the Greek elections, the World Economic Forum of the world's capitalist elites in Davos concluded its meeting with statement stressing that “politics in Europe is the greatest risk for the world economy”, naming especially Greece and Ukraine. The massive repudiation of “austerity”by the Greek people came as a huge shock, confirming all their fears.

After five consecutive years of social catastrophe that has reduced the Greek people into a nation of the destitute, millions of innocent victims, using their vote as an available weapon, rebelled against their executioners: the troika of European Union, European Central Bank, and the IMF as well as their subservient bourgeois governments in Athens that had imposed the measures of social cannibalism misnamed “austerity”and “structural reforms”, and codified as the 'Memorandum' tied to the 'rescue packages' by the EU and the IMF to bankrupt Greece.

All the parties that had governed under the orders of troika, first of all the right wing New Democracy and the neo-liberal “center left”PASOK, were defeated. Some of them were marginalized, others completely annihilated : PASOK, the far right LAOS, the “Democratic Left”, as well as the “new”split from PASOK headed by former Prime Minister George Papandreou, the first to introduce the Memorandum in 2010.

For the first time in the history of modern Greece, a party of the Left was handed an electoral triumph: the anti-austerity reformist Syriza. Promising to put an end to misery, to the Memorandum and to the troika's tyranny, it was raised by a massive popular vote into the leading position, enabling it to form a government.

Less than three years ago, up to the elections of May and June 2012, Syriza was a small, moderate, left-reformist party, emerging from splits in the Greek Communist Party in the 1960s and 1990s, joined later by small groups of the extra-parliamentary left, with a modest base in the working class, the unions and the petty bourgeoisie and a marginal role in the youth and student movements, getting around 4 per cent of the vote. But in the 2012 elections, it was catapulted into the second position of the official opposition with 27 per cent. Why?

The social devastation and upheavals of the period of 2010-12, the mass demonstrations, occupations of public buildings and squares, above all, the occupation of Syntagma Square in front of the discredited Parliament by the “Indignant”people, the General Strikes, People's Assemblies, as well as the barbaric brutality of the police in reaction to these events - led to the crisis of legitimacy and disintegration of the bourgeois parliamentary system. That system, as it was established after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, consisted of New Democracy and PASOK alternately taking on the helm of government.

No party, including Syriza, had played a leading role in the upheaval of 2010-12. One week before the May 6, 2012 elections, Syriza's support still remained around 8 -10 per cent. The main focus of the spontaneous movement then being in favor of a protest vote for many “small”parties considered to be “non systemic”. The decisive turn came when at the last stage of the campaign the Syriza leadership launched the call “For a Government of the Left to cancel the Memorandum!”Then, much of the popular anger and hopes turned en masse to the left as a credible alternative to power and gave to Syriza an unexpected and astounding advance. Unexpected, although in a minor scale, was, also, the threatening ascent of the Nazi “Golden Dawn”, from a marginal group into a force entering Parliament for the first time.

The call for “For a Government of the Left”, in the Greek historical context has a totally different significance in comparison with other European countries where often parliamentary “governments of the left”were formed by social democratic parties in coalition or not with 'Communist' parties. Greece never knew a mass social democracy (PASOK was a national populist movement of bourgeois character, later degenerating into neoliberalism). The country is profoundly marked by imperialist intervention and a bloody civil war in the 1940s to “smash the communist threat”coming out of the anti-Nazi Resistance. Decades of anti-communist hysteria followed with persecutions, concentration camps, executions, and witch-hunts of anything considered as “leftist”. The climax came with the dictatorship of the CIA colonels in 1967. That regime collapsed in 1974, following the brutal suppression of the youth rebellion of the Polytechnic in Athens, and the coup by the Greek junta in Cyprus opening the door to the Turkish invasion and occupation of half of the island. Given this historical conjuncture, a “government of the Left”means, in the popular social consciousness, a government by the political representatives of the defeated revolutionary movement of the Partisans.

Not by accident, during the revolt of December 2008, the slogan "Varkiza is finished" was written on the walls of Athens.[In Varkiza, near Athens, the partisans of ELAS, after the Stalinist betrayal, surrendered their arms to the British military and to the shadow of Greek bourgeois power] Nor by accident as well, during the recent electoral period, despite Syriza's moderation, the Right wing Samaras government waged a vicious anti-communist campaign using the same slogans as in the civil war, against the “Sovietization of Greece”, “for the salvation of fatherland, religion and family”, even “for the defense of our victory in 1949 against the communist bandits”, while the Nazis of the “Golden Dawn”presented themselves as “the only force able to defeat Syriza's communists and Marxist anti-nationalism”. The virulence of the slogans reflects the sharp polarization that is now an enduring feature of social life in Greece.

No one should forget that the Golden Dawn, with its leaders in prison still emerged as the third force in Parliament with a civil war, fascist agenda. The January 2015 elections were not the end of the crisis of State power but an opening of a new, sharper period escalating inexorably, driven by the capitalist crisis, towards a historic confrontation of the workers and poor with the Greek and international ruling classes and their repression forces.

Despite the tremendous victory given to Syriza by the people moving to the left, the Syriza leadership itself moved to the right : they formed a coalition “Popular Front”type government of class collaboration with the “Independent Greeks”- ANEL, a far right bourgeois nationalist party, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, Turcophobic, homophobic, religiously obscurantist. Furthermore, together with other ministries, Syriza offered the Ministry of the Armed Forces to the leader of ANEL Panos Kammenos, a notorious chauvinist, anti-Semite, a close friend of the Greek shipowners and his co-thinker Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant far right UKIP. Memories of Chile in 1973 are raised, and the appointment of Pinochet to a similar position by Allende are inescapable.

Phony arguments were presented: because Syriza was two seats short of forming a majority in parliament, this alliance with ANEL was supposedly necessary to form a government given the stubborn rejection of any support by the Stalinist KKE; or, that it was a “lesser evil”to have as ally ANEL than the bogus Potami (“River”: a “party”artificially constructed by bourgeois mass media magnates, uniting remnants of the center left with the most right wing neo-liberals).

Syriza could have again put pressure on the KKE to join it in a coalition government, much more relevant now than in 2012. And in any case, it could have put the Stalinist leaders in a very difficult position in front of their supporters. To choose between ANEL and Potami is to choose between cholera and pestilence. But even without the KKE, formally, Syriza could form a minority government based on 149 seats, which could stand, if other parties abstained or were absent, giving objectively a “vote of tolerance”. Otherwise, by voting against, these parties could be shown as responsible for new elections that nobody wanted.

It is obvious that the coalition between Syriza and ANEL was a decision already taken before the elections (Kammenos did not make any effort to hide it). And it was announced, hurriedly, during the same night of the elections, without formally trying to search for other options, and behind the back of the Party itself and its supporters.

The main argument to excuse this haste is that “Syriza had to immediately form a coalition with [bourgeois] patriotic anti-austerity forces to have a solid basis in its extremely difficult negotiations with the EU as the bailout program expires in February 28.”The strategy of “a national anti-austerity unity”above classes is counter-posed to a strategy of internationalist class struggle towards workers power and a socialist way out from the crisis of bankrupt capitalism in Greece and Europe.

The justification advanced by Syriza of their class collaboration with reactionary nationalists is not only unsustainable but also self-defeating. In the inescapable confrontation with the imperialists of the EU and the international usurers, any basis for a real defense of the workers' and the interests of the masses is undermined by their refusal to break from the imperialist EU and by allying with bourgeois forces looking for an impossible “national capitalist solution”within an unprecedented world capitalist depression. This is a strategy not to defeat the stranglehold of the imperialist predators but to defeat the emerging forces of socialist revolution in Greece and in Europe. Brussels, Berlin, and Washington know it very well.

Syriza's demands are for an impossible compromise. To survive as a government it has to respond to the popular expectations by fighting austerity; but that means to clash with the austerity imposed by the EU and Germany. To fight austerity means to find relief from the burden of an unsustainable Greek debt, and at the same time, to avoid the consequences of a Grexit. Syriza looks for a bargain with a hostile but frightened EU, hoping to find a space in the starting international re-negotiation imposed by the failure to confront the crisis so far by means of austerity.

The new Greek government started by declarations that the fired public sector workers will be rehired, that privatizations of harbors and electricity will be canceled, while the flamboyant Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was openly defying the leader of the Eurogoup, rejecting both the extension of the Memorandum and any return of the hated troika. The Greek people were delighted but neither Brussels nor Berlin were smiling. From the other side of the ocean, significantly, Obama phoned the new Prime Minister Tsipras to congratulate him and to express his opposition to...austerity!

While Varoufakis is making his tour around the European capitals insisting that he seeks no confrontation but “deliberation”, the confrontation has already begun. Berlin openly expressed its hostility to any change. The ECB has the means, by stopping the financing of the Greek banks, to provoke their collapse after March of this year. George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, emphasized after his discussion with Varoufakis: “the stand-off between Greece and the eurozone is the greatest risk to the global economy”( Financial Times 2/2/2015).[2] The Wall Street Journal echoed the same concern.

The fears of the ruling classes in the imperialist West were compounded by the initial questioning by the new Greek government of the announcement by the EU that it had agreed “unanimously" to impose new sanctions against Russia, blaming it for the new escalation of the civil war in South-Eastern Ukraine. But afterward, the Tsipras government made clear that it was questioning the process, the fact that it was not consulted, and not the essence of the matter. Then, the new Foreign Minister, Nikos Kotzias (an opportunist who started as a high priest of Stalinism in the KKE to jump later to PASOK becoming a close adviser to George Papandreou before taking the ministry of foreign affairs in the current government) has signed the document of the EU extending the sanctions against Russia until September 2015. By signing he made the following servile comment: “I am not a Russian puppet[...]We are not against every sanction. We are in the mainstream, we are not the bad boys”( Mail On Line, 31/1/2015)

From a certain vantage point, the new government Syriza-ANEL could be seen as a transitional formation combining all the contradictions of Greek society in the current phase of the world crisis. Rather sooner than later these contradictions will explode. It has some features of a Kerensky type of government in a transitional period towards the decisive class confrontation in the struggle for power.

The EEK fights among the masses in all fronts to prepare, organize, educate the proletarian vanguard for this confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution. This is the reason behind our independent intervention in the elections with our own lists and program: to build a revolutionary alternative in the working class without tail ending Syriza, and without turning our back on the masses following Syriza.

As a small revolutionary party with the vast majority of members unemployed and the rest with wages or pensions drastically cut in the last years, we could not afford the enormous financial cost, a few months from our latest national participation in the May 2014 European elections, to present independent candidates all over Greece. So we were limited to participate only in 25 among the 56 regions of the country. We got only 2,441 votes votes, 0.04 per cent. The dominant tendency was to vote Syriza to get rid of the Right, the Memorandum of austerity, and the rule of the troika.

In a very polarized situation and with only 2-3 weeks for campaigning, all our comrades made a heroic effort that everyone in Greece respected.. We had found a warm response among new layers of the oppressed. Our appearances on television and radio on a national and local level made a deep impression and provoked energetic debates. Our intervention was also discussed on the international stage. Not only did we get the support of our comrades of the CRFI in Argentina, Italy, and Turkey ( the comrades of the Turkish DIP actively helped our campaign, and we are grateful to this demonstration of internationalism in practice) but also beyond: from Russia and Ukraine to Portugal, and from the US to Scotland, England, Austria, South Africa and Australia. The international importance of this battle attracted the attention of fighters everywhere.

Internationalism was one of the main demarcation lines of the EEK from reformism and centrism, in a situation where all forms of virulent nationalisms are clashing all over Europe again as in the 1930s.

Two battles on that front were particularly important: the clash before the elections with the centrist ANTARSYA when its majority made an alliance with “left”nationalists advocating the return to the drachma and opposing the socialist unification of Europe; secondly, after the elections, immediately after the formation of the coalition government Syriza-ANEL when we raised the transitional demand: “Out with the far right nationalist bourgeois ministers - for a Syriza/KKE government of the Left, based on the organizations of the working class, and with a socialist program to exit from the crisis”. Our call found a great response among the members and supporters of Syriza, even in the ranks of the KKE which remains dominated by bureaucratic sectarianism and blindness to the change in the situation. The main pro-Syriza evening daily Efimerida ton Syntakton published (28/1/15) in a prominent place in its center pages our Call against the class collaboration of Syriza with the far right nationalist party ANEL.

Fighting both sectarian blindness and opportunist adaptation to the new government, we intervene in the class struggle actualizing our program with transitional demands - to cancel the debt, to end austerity and unemployment, to break from the imperialists of the EU, the US and NATO, for bread, jobs, freedom, health, education, to take back the life that they had stolen from us, the people. Thus, we develop our ties with the broad masses now entering, with renewed hope and courage, into the arena of struggle where their fate will be decided.

Monday, February 2, 2015

First cabinet meeting of new government of Greece, presided over by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras

On the premise that sometimes knowing the wrong
way to do something helps in figuring out the right way, here is a quote from
the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)
about the victory of Syriza in last week's national election in Greece.

The International Committee of the
Fourth International rejects with contempt the political excuse offered
by the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left to justify support for Syriza and its
pro-capitalist agenda—that a Tsipras government is a necessary “experience”
for the working class, from which it will somehow come to understand the
necessity for genuinely socialist policies.

Such sophistries
are advanced only to oppose the emergence of a revolutionary movement of the
working class, a development possible only through a relentless political
exposure of Syriza. This task is undertaken by the World
Socialist Web Site in order to prepare workers and young people for
the decisive struggles they face in Greece and internationally.

This is from an article on Jan. 27. And here's another one
posted the next day, making the same point. (In both cases, the underlining is
by me).

Another of their arguments is that one must support Syriza, so
that the working class can go through these experiences and learn from them.
This is pure cynicism. Given the enormous dangers posed by a Syriza
government, the task of a Marxist party is to expose the class interests
represented by Syriza, to warn the working class against its consequences and
provide it with a clear socialist orientation.

This is how the World Socialist Web Site and the
International Committee of the Fourth International participate in the
“experiences” in Greece. The numerous
pseudo-left groups cling to Syriza because they represent the same class
interests as this party. They speak for better-off layers of the middle class, who
fear an independent movement of the working class, and who are concerned to
ensure their own social elevation within the bourgeois order.

These quotes are both examples of what Marxists
call sectarianism. You can read Trotsky's classic diagnosis of this
degenerative political disease here.

What I find striking is how in both these quotes
the word experience (or experiences) is in scare quotes. The ostensible target
of this criticism is other “pseudo-left” groups, but the real target is the
masses: it is their experience that is being denigrated (“rejects with
contempt”) with these scare quotes. They voted in their millions for a party
whose Greek acronym stands for Coalition of the Radical Left. Nothing like this
has happened in Europe in more than half a century. The election has also aroused the hopes of millions of other victims
of savage austerity in Spain, Portugal and Italy. It marks the upsurge of a
mass movement seeking radical social change. If you don't find this important,
then you aren't a revolutionary.

Sectarians see things differently.
What they see is – to use a prefix much favored by WSWS writers – a 'pseudo'
experience. Nothing significant happened in the Greek election. “Syriza’s election victory does not express a political
development, a step forward, progress or anything of the kind by or for the
working class.” For them political analysis is quite simple: what happened is
not a revolution, hence it is reactionary. One bourgeois party replaced another
bourgeois party in power: that is their reading of the election.

To be sure, Greece is still a long way from a
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but you hardly need the accumulated
wisdom of Marxism to see that. What you do need that wisdom for is to properly
assess whether or not this experience is a step towards that ultimate goal, and
use that assessment as the basis for intervening in the political life of the
masses.

Sectarians aren't interested in steps, or should I
say “steps”. For them the Syriza victory doesn't count as a step forward. But what would count? Apart from more people reading the
WSWS or joining the SEP, these sectarians have no answer for that, and see no
pressing need to come up with one.

Marxists use a category like
“bourgeois party” to understand political reality more deeply, but in the hands
of a sectarian such a category becomes devoid of content, and little more than
a form of name-calling. Thus we are told by the WSWS that in “its origin,
social composition and politics, Syriza is a bourgeois party” comparable to
Barack Obama and the Democrats. In fact, the core of Syriza comes from the
Eurocommunists who split from the pro-Soviet wing of the Communist Party in the
late 1980s. Stalinist parties are not revolutionary parties, but Trotskyists
have never simply labeled them bourgeois because this distorts their origin and
the specific nature of their relationship to the working class.

Syriza eventually evolved into an
umbrella organization for 13 groups, including social democrats, Maoists,
Trotskyists, left ecologists and liberals. Again this is not a revolutionary
party but neither is it a conventional bourgeois party: to that extent at
least, the featuring of Radical Left in its name is not false advertising. And
that matters because millions of voters came to identify their aspirations with
Syriza precisely because they saw it as a radical departure from the
mainstream. Nor are those aspirations just for vague promises of hope and
change a la Obama: they are very clearly for an end to austerity.

Such distinctions are important for
revolutionary Marxists but not for sectarians. “Sectarians are capable of
differentiating between but two colors: red and black. So as not to tempt
themselves, they simplify reality. They refuse to draw a distinction between
the fighting camps in Spain for the reason that both camps have a bourgeois
character” (Trotsky).

Another way of saying this is that
sectarians have a kitchen-sink approach to politics. A good example is the
constantly used epithet “pseudo-left” on the WSWS. If you unpack this phrase,
what it means is that everyone else on the left isn't left at all, they're all
just “pseudo-left”. This includes any and all parties calling themselves
Marxist or Trotskyist or revolutionary socialist. The only truly left party on
the planet is the SEP. Everyone else belongs in the sink of “pseudo-leftism”.
Here the rhetoric gets so far removed from reality as to become delusional.

Sectarians have only contempt for
“experience” but they have enormous faith in propaganda. In their view, it is
“sophistries” to say that the Greek working class needs to go through the
experience of a Syriza government “from which it will somehow come to
understand the necessity for genuinely socialist policies.” What the workers
really need is “a relentless political exposure of Syriza”, which is to say,
propaganda by the WSWS. The second quote hammers home the same point: it is
“pure cynicism” to imagine that “the working class can go through these
experiences and learn from them”. Instead, “the task of a Marxist party is to
expose the class interests represented by Syriza, to warn the working class
against its consequences and provide it with a clear socialist orientation” ...
in other words, propaganda.

Which raises an important question –
how does the working class learn? Does it learn primarily from
propaganda, no matter how “relentless”, or does it learn primarily from its own
experiences, with or without scare quotes? The SEP, which is vehemently
materialist in its stated philosophical views, is actually idealist when it
comes to its politics: propaganda matters, experience not at all.

But this isn't how the real world
works. Nor is it how Marxists have traditionally understood their task as
revolutionaries. Marxists aren't contemptuous of the experience of the masses;
on the contrary, they do everything possible to engage with that experience.
What does engage mean in this context? Trotsky addressed this in The
Transitional Program: it means finding a bridge between the present
situation – in Greece, the fight against austerity – and the fight for
socialism.

Of course this involves propaganda
for socialism, to the widest extent possible. And it means not pulling any
punches in criticisms of the new government, particularly any concessions it
makes to the domestic bourgeoisie or the European financial elites. A major
political upsurge of the masses creates great dangers as well as great
opportunities. We already have an example of this in Greece, with Syriza
forming a government with a right-wing populist party. But sectarians see only
the dangers and “reject with contempt” the opportunities. They do “not understand
the dialectical action and reaction between a finished program and a living –
that is to say, imperfect and unfinished – mass struggle.”

In the case of Greece, engaging with
the masses means putting demands on Syriza which can mobilize broad support. Employment
in particular seems to be what in American political parlance is called a
“wedge issue” – an excellent phrase that revolutionaries should adopt. In
Greece we need a program of demands addressed to “wedge issues” – demands
designed to drive a wedge between the deep desire of the masses to end
austerity and the obscene wealth of the elites who cannot accommodate that
desire. Such a program would work to activate mass struggles and create the
conditions for workers and young people to learn from their own experiences
that only socialism will bring an end to austerity. This really would be a revolutionary policy, in stark contrast to
the pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric of sectarianism.

Engaging
with the masses also means listening to them, not just hectoring at them. Take
for example Syriza's alliance with the right-wing populist Independent Greeks.
For a sectarian this is just an 'I told you so' moment. But this isn't how
revolutionaries operate. Here is a Syriza supporter, in fact writing a comment
reacting to one of the WSWS sectarian diatribes:

“The cooperation between SYRIZA and
the 'Independent Greeks' was a necessary evil in order to make an anti
austerity coalition in order to form a government. The Communist Party of
Greece will not even speak to SYRIZA and the 'River' party, although claiming
to be what you would call 'pseudo left' is more for maintaining the economic
status-quo than the other parties and the PASOK is completely sold out so not
much room for choice. The expressed line of the IGs are anti-austerity and
their actions have shown this to be so.”

Marxists would disagree that the
alliance with the Independent Greeks was a “necessary evil', but it's not
enough just to dismiss such an argument or denounce it. The points about the other
parties are entirely true, and the voters who backed Syriza wanted them to form
a government. Under these circumstances, it would seem that a minority
government would have been possible, and that the Syriza leadership opted for a
formal alliance, including handing the crucial Defense Ministry to the
Independent Greeks, to give themselves some political 'wiggle room'. This
raises a crucial question: can you fight austerity and yet be pro-capitalist,
as the Independent Greeks are? This person still seems to think that's
possible, and no doubt he is far from being alone in this regard. If Greek
revolutionaries are ever to get a hearing from such people, they will have to
inoculate themselves against sectarianism.

The Transitional Program is still offered for sale at the online bookstore affiliated with the WSWS

The gutter politics of David North

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) edition of May 17 featured a hysterical diatribe against me by the leader of that organization, David North.

Here we are today, 33 years after the split with Healy. Does the fact that North was on the right side of that split confer upon him the legitimacy of a hereditary monarch? Reading North’s comments, one would think that for him the Fourth International is some kind of franchise that he alone can operate. If the continuity of the Fourth International is to have any meaning, other than a ritualistic invocation meant to shore up the flagging morale of one’s followers, it can only be in one’s adherence to the program and theoretical conceptions of the Fourth International. If we examine the political conceptions and organizational practices of the group North has led for all these years it is clear that in all respects it bears little resemblance to the organization Trotsky founded in 1938. It is in fact our exposure of the hollowness of North’s claims to be the inheritor of the mantle of Trotsky that has so infuriated him. Why else would he be spending more time writing about me and Frank Brenner, two individuals, than about the Stalinists, Pabloites and state capitalists?

Trump and the crisis of liberalism

by Frank Brenner

It is tempting to say that 2016 marks the death of liberalism, but that's probably wishful thinking. What is dead, though, is the old 'centrist' political consensus, i.e. the pendulum swings from centre-left to centre-right that made mainstream politics in the West about as predictable (and stable) as an old grandfather clock. Now the swings are much more extreme - or rather the swings to the right are. (One might add that what led up to this was a major shift rightward of the 'center' itself from Reagan/Thatcher on – what Tariq Ali rightly dubbed the “extreme center”.

Lecture: Dialectics of Revolutionary Strategy and Tactics

Alex Steiner gave a talk at the Locomotiva Cooperative Cafe in Athens, Greece on July 9, 2015, shortly after the historic vote for NO - OXI -in the Referendum of July 5. The event was a huge success attracting a packed audience of about 50 people. The talk was sponsored by the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK) and was chaired by Savas Michael-Matsas. A Greek translation of this talk is now available. The translation was first published in the theoretical journal of the EEK, Revolutionary Marxist Review, in the issue of November 2015-February 2016. The translation was the work of Eve Manopoulou.

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